Executive Spotlight: Interview with John Bozarth, Amentum’s SVP of Mission Readiness

John Bozarth, senior vice president of Mission Readiness at Amentum, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding the company’s efforts to drive growth, solve customers’ most critical needs, as well as expand solutions and technologies, through valuable partnerships. He also discussed how Amentum will continue to grow in new markets moving into 2021.

“Our Amentum team is focused on providing solutions and technologies that will impact our customers’ mission. We utilize technology to drive efficiencies and cost savings. We look for talent that can develop these solutions and weave them into our proposals, so they are compelling. That’s what makes our offerings very competitive.”

ExecutiveBiz: What are some of the most effective ways that you’ve been able to utilize and drive growth for Amentum?

“You have to look at each customer individually and evaluate how you can best position yourself to win the deal, based on how your past performance and expertise match up to what the customer needs and requirements are. We are focused on markets that are supported by account plans. We meet with customers to introduce Amentum capabilities, to better understand their requirements and to vet solutions. We develop white papers and Request for Information (RFI) responses to try and shape the opportunities.

We follow an Amentum-tailored Shipley process as our business growth model. It’s a very structured process, however we allow our business developers the flexibility to tailor the process as they see fit to improve our probability of winning the deal. Our teams are not only focused on delivering a very competitive proposal, but a more compelling proposal through the identification of strengths and use of technology offerings.”

ExecutiveBiz: What are the greatest needs of your customers and how does the company plan to meet them?

“We are seeing a move with some accounts away from a commodity-based Low Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) approach to a shift again back to more ‘best-value’ competitions. A lot of it depends on the customer and contract vehicle they are utilizing.

For those customers looking for innovation we have partnered with IFS to develop a supply chain management offering called SupplyTRAC. For those customers in an LPTA environment it is all about the staffing solution and being able to develop a basis of estimate to deliver an optimum staffing solution for the lowest price.”

ExecutiveBiz: How does Amentum find talent and people; can you provide insight into how to build a strong team in this industry?

“Our recruiters are some of the best talent in the industry. We utilize Glassdoor and LinkedIn extensively to not only recruit individuals, but to showcase our capabilities and offerings. When we are positioning for an opportunity, we always look for a program manager that is known to the customer and try to surround the individual with the subject matter experts to make our bid stand out.

From a business development perspective, Amentum looks for talent for specific markets that can develop solutions and weave those solutions into the proposal effectively. We look for individuals that can tell the ‘story’ while ensuring customer requirements are being met, also integrating strengths and discriminators in a compelling manner and ensuring proposal compliance.”

ExecutiveBiz: Where do you see Amentum bringing the most value into the future?

“That would probably be in the area of our technology offerings.  We want to drive our proposals from competitive to compelling. We are leveraging our Advanced Technology Office (ATO) to develop these solutions and to work with our capture teams to integrate them into our proposal solutions in the most effective way possible to offer the greatest benefit to our customers at the most competitive price.”

ExecutiveBiz: Are there any new markets that you’re trying to break into?

“With the recent acquisition of DynCorp International we are looking at areas for growth synergies. Some of the areas we are pursuing include the overseas contingency market as well as the Department of State. We would also like to try and expand our unmanned systems support in the operations and maintenance market and feel that we can be very competitive there. One way we are looking to do this is through the new ASTRO IDIQ vehicle that is being executed by GSA.”